my body is a cage
by firelights
Summary: AxelSora - above all else, remember that you have loved.


**a/n**: it's been a long time, yes? yes. let's try it all again. hopefully it'll go a little smoother this time.

for shesayslove at lj.

* * *

**my body is a cage**

.

i.

(sometimes Sora gets this sensation like heart-ache. It is like his soul is trying to push itself down inside of him, crush itself into something small and pathetic—he doesn't understand at all. It has been a year and Sora has grown older and taller and has maybe also grown to be just a little _more_, than he used to be. And yet there is something in him eternally shrinking.

he thinks this must mean something. He wish he knew what.)

At night, he dreams of being held by someone. He dreams of bony elbows and shoulders and long limbs, of burying his face into someone's chest and breathing in their scent.

When he wakes up, it is often with this feeling like maybe he had not been dreaming at all.

(he _remembers _being held by someone. It comes to him slowly, in pieces—first, there is him leaning his head in against their collarbone, and then the feeling of their throat thrumming against his cheek as they talk. Sora wishes he could hear what it is they are trying to tell him.)

.

ii.

Sora sometimes thinks he has enough love inside him for the entire world. He has love for all the people that he has met, and maybe even for the people he is fighting—a pitying sort of love, a quietly sad sort.

Nonetheless, it is love.

.

Lately, he has been wondering if he could truly hate anyone. There is Axel, who has kidnapped Kairi and would have used her for nothing more than to hurt him, and yet there is a part of Sora that wants very desperately not to hate him for it. He wants to believe Axel is on his side, more than he would want this of anyone else (except maybe Riku—Riku, who he has never stopped trusting even when he has given Sora so many reasons to. Sora has love enough for everyone, but he thinks he has probably a little bit more for Riku than he has for anybody else).

Sora is not entirely sure why this is. But when he looks at Axel, there is something in him that wonders if maybe they could have been closer than this. He thinks that in another universe, one where Sora is not the hero and Axel is not what he believes might be the enemy (he is growing less and less sure. He is beginning to understand, now, that life is not split cleanly into good people and bad ones), they could have been friends of a sort.

.

(Sora still dreams.

He dreams now of watching the movements of somebody's mouth, and trying very hard to read-their-lips because their voice still does not reach him. And he dreams of lifting his hand up to their face, and trying to remember what they looked like—what the colour of their hair and the shape of their eyes and the line of their jaw were like.

He can't. It makes him almost want to cry.)

.

iii.

Once, Axel comes to see him in the night.

They are in Hollow Bastion, again, and Sora cannot sleep. There is something in him that won't settle (a feeling like nothing at all. Only _feeling_, blindly and honestly, without a name or a direction to it).

When he steps outside—he thinks at the time that it is for air, or for the cold, but later he wonders if maybe there is a part of him that had known this would happen—Axel is there, staring into the sky. Sora opens his mouth to ask him why he is here, or what he wants, but all that comes out is, "Axel." It is not even a question.

(and even then, even with it just being Axel's name, it stirs something inside of him. When Sora's mouth moves with the shapes of it, he feels as though his mind is desperately trying to recall something from a long time ago—a memory that he cannot remember. It's the _strangest _feeling.)

Axel turns to look at him, and Sora cannot read the expression on his face. It is almost sadness but not-quite.

"Sora?" he says, very quietly. He sounds

(ravenous—as though he is imagining tearing Sora apart, devouring him)

off.

.

And he touches Axel, or maybe Axel touches him first—he cannot honestly remember. But either way he has his hands on Axel's face, tracing his jaw-line and stroking his cheek, and Axel has his fingers curled into the base of Sora's neck. In the back of his mind, Sora thinks that they must have done this before, no matter how implausible that is; because there is such a familiar feeling to it, like they are two old-lovers together again, two pieces of a broken-part fitting with one another perfectly.

(Sora believes that all broken things will come together again some day. It is all he has to hang onto, at times—'everything can be fixed'. And he believes whole-heartedly that he will save the world, and save Riku and Kairi and will maybe even save Axel, because he cannot imagine the alternative.)

"Sora," Axel says again, leaning in closer to him. Their lips almost touch.

.

After Axel leaves (he had gone in something of a hurry—maybe because he had realised what they were doing was not right, or that he was not who Sora should be touching or nearly-kissing or loving. Or maybe even because Sora is not be the one _he _should be loving), Sora finds himself able to sleep again.

He doesn't dream, that night.

.

iv.

Later, later;

Sora watches Axel disappear. Sora watches him begin fading away into nothing and thinks, 'he did this for me, he is dying for me'. And even when Axel says that he had wanted to see Roxas, that he had done it for him, Sora still thinks that deep-down it must have at least partly been for him as well.

Axel says to him, "He made me feel like I had a heart", and Sora wants to tell him not to strain himself with speaking. And he doesn't, because he understands this is something Axel _needs _to tell him, if only for his own peace. Sora thinks he must have been holding it in for such a long time now, and that maybe saying it on his death-bed was all that he had ever really wanted.

(he had wanted to die from the start. Sora is only just now coming to realise this, and does not know what it is he feels when he thinks of it.)

"It's kind of funny," Axel tells him, laughing so weakly Sora barely hears it. "You—you make me feel the same…"

Sora does not know what to say to him. He thinks there is nothing left to say, now.

So he presses his hand against Axel's chest and waits until it falls-through because there is nothing left for it to press against. And he watches the smoke of Axel's body curl and dissipate, and feels something inside of him break apart (and break open, and break free).


End file.
